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Viliam_Bur comments on Problems in Education - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (318)
I found myself wanting to say "I think this sort of grant proposal thing happens maybe 25% of the time, but not all the time, the way the post implies."
I also wished there was some kind of gradation for "school insider/outsider". I'm an outsider, but I talk a lot with a friend who teaches full time. I showed this article to her and she said "yes, yes, yes. This is basically how it is."
I actually DO still assign substantial probability to this being a hoax, despite it matching my understanding - we know the this is sockpuppet account, created ostensibly for NDA anonymity. But can think of some people here who might have created this explicitly as a test of rationality, who are sort of annoyed that the politics involved here get less scrutiny and want to demonstrate that.
Spreading false data as a "test of rationality" would be actively harmful. But I can imagine people misunderstanding that.
Rationality is a method of working with the data you have. You should update on evidence correctly, instead of updating incorrectly. You should be able to recognize that this specific piece of evidence contradicts the model based on all other evidence, which makes this specific piece of evidence suspicious. But also should estimate your degree of certainty in a given model.
It is proper to say "I defy the data" when one's model is based on a lot of reliable evidence. Saying it more often would be overconfidence, not rationality.
I was assuming that if it were a hoax, they'd let people know in another few days with a gloating update.
I agree that this would be the most likely course of action if the essay is a hoax, but I think it would still risk being harmful overall, since retractions generally don't result in an appropriate corresponding decrease in confidence in the material that was originally presented. I'd expect Less Wrong members in general to be better at reducing their confidence in a retracted claim than most people, but better is not necessarily good enough.